Planning

One of the changes I have made in the last 2 years is more planning for our homeschool year. I always wanted to be a fly by the seat of my pants kinda gal but that simply does not work well for our family. We tried doing the boxed curriculum where you just do x number of pages in each subject each day but that did not work well at all for us. So I embraced the planner.

First I do an overview of an entire year. I use the method described in the following video to map out our homeschooling year:



On this page I put all the info for birthdays and holidays plus field trips or any vacations we might take during the year. It also helps me to plan out breaks too.

I get my other planning pages from Donna Young. I gather up the curriculum I plan to do for that year and just write out some goals. Some science and history we use over 2 years. I typically plan 2 weeks out at a time. I use one of the weekly planners from Donna Young. I have bought planners but none have really suited our needs and I just end up not using it. This is all still a work in progress. Starting next semester I plan to do at least 3 weeks at a time so that I am looking forward to what books we might need to check out from the library. It also gives me more time to get a suitable substitute for books that do not work for us.

Homeschooling

During the school year I am blessed to be at home with my children learning right along with them. We have been on this journey for 7 years now. It has been trying at times but mostly it has been deeply satisfying. I feel like I really know my kids and the bond in our family is very strong. I would like to start a series of posts where I share about the curriculum that we choose to use. There are many different styles of homeschooling and I do not feel that any really describe what we do. I guess if I had to choose the closest would be eclectic. We use a lot of the resources provided by Ambleside Online. This is a Charlotte Mason/Living Books approach to teaching. I lean heavily on this method but like all things in my life I am not a purest. I also use some of the Waldorf methods of homeschooling and some of the classical stuff too. This year has been the first year that I have really spent time in prayer and asked God's guidance in our school year. It has made this year the best year so far. I am more at peace with my choices and the kids have gotten a lot more out of our school year than ever before.

Over the next few posts I will talk about the different curriculum that we have used over the past 7 years and what we are using now.